Security vs. Rebuilding: Kurdish Town Loses Out

By JAMES GLANZ

Published: April 16, 2005

For years Nuradeen Ghreeb has dreamed of bringing clean drinking water to his hometown. That town happens to be Halabja, where 17 years ago he and his parents cowered in a basement as Saddam Hussein's airplanes attacked with chemical weapons, killing at least 5,000 people.

But on Sunday, Mr. Nuradeen learned that his dream was over, because the United States had canceled the water project it had planned here as part of a vast effort to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Ordinarily a quiet and reserved civil engineer, he sat on one of his beloved water pipes on hearing the news and wept, his tears glistening in the afternoon sun.

''If the Americans think that training the Iraqi Army comes before clean drinking water for the people of Halabja,'' he said quietly, ''then we can't expect anything from them.''

The Halabja project, worth around $10 million, accounted for a small fraction of the $18.4 billion that Congress approved in 2003 for the reconstruction of Iraq, including $4 billion for water and sewage projects. But with the outbreak of insurgency in central and southern Iraq last year, the United States shifted $3.4 billion from water, electricity and oil projects to pay for training and equipping the Iraqi Army and police forces.

The implications of that shift are only now becoming clear as individual projects are canceled in scores of communities across the country. Some of the largest cuts have come in waterworks: of 81 water projects that were to be financed through the Public Works Ministry, all but 13 have been canceled, with many of the rest reduced in scale, ministry officials say.

The project in this northern Kurdish town, where Mr. Nuradeen has been head of water and sewage projects since 2001, was one of those to lose out.

''They cut Halabja, of all places,'' said Nesreen M. Siddeek Berwari, the national public works minister, who happens to be Kurdish. ''I'm outraged and amazed. Where else is it more important to do a water project?''

No more than 50 percent of Halabja's population has regular running water, and even that may be contaminated by bat feces from the mountain cave where much of the water originates.

In November a delegation from the Environment Ministry visited the town and found that contamination of its water supply could be connected with abnormalities found in residents' white and red blood cell counts and the relatively high levels of kidney disease, miscarriages and other maladies that have been reported here.

Mr. Nuradeen became anxious about the project a few weeks ago when he heard rumors from relief organizations that it might have been cut. But none of the officials and contractors who had promised the project bothered to inform him of the cancellation, and he learned the full facts only on Sunday, when a reporter relayed information collected in Baghdad at the Public Works Ministry and the American Embassy.

Mr. Nuradeen, a chunky man with a broad face, looking very much the staid engineer in his sleeveless gray sweater and checked shirt, struggled to maintain his composure as he heard the news, seated on the water pipe, assiduously taking notes. Then he began sobbing.

''Everybody uses Halabja like a card,'' he said finally. ''But when it comes to working in Halabja, nobody does it.''

Along with most of the people in Halabja and its surrounding villages, about 100,000 in all, Mr. Nuradeen is very aware of the symbolic role their town has had in helping to justify the invasion of Iraq. Local residents also understand the central importance that the mass graves in the local cemetery will have in the impending war crimes trials of Mr. Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali.

While American officials hold that the shift of billions of dollars from reconstruction to security was essential for maintaining stability in Iraq, the tradeoff carries a special resonance in Iraqi Kurdistan, where pesh merga fighters resisted Mr. Hussein's army for decades and have handily kept the peace since 2003.

For Mr. Nuradeen, whose memory of details verges on the photographic, the issue is particularly fraught. After he and his parents reached the high ground on the mountains beside his town in 1988, when he was 15, he had watched in anguish as Iraqi military planes strafed the long lines of citizens fleeing Halabja in their colorful Kurdish garb.

But there is more than historical quid pro quo at work in calls for a new water system. Although many Kurds believe that the health problems in the town can be traced back to lingering environmental effects of the chemical attack, officials at the Environment Ministry say more likely culprits are the sewage that seeps into cracks in the town's damaged water network and other pollution sources.

Those sources could include the thousands of bats that live in the mountain cave, although the town has not been able to obtain the comprehensive water tests that could tell for sure. Many townspeople are also forced to rely on well water of unknown quality.

Kurdistan was particularly hard hit in the water cuts, as the number of projects to be financed through the Public Works Ministry dropped to two from 20, a ministry official said.

The Halabja project was to have been financed through an obscure American government entity called the Projects and Contracting Office, which is overseen by another office in the United States Embassy in Baghdad called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, directed by Bill Taylor.

Mr. Taylor said in an interview that the investment in training Iraqi security forces had already started to pay off, most notably during the Iraqi elections. ''If you want to add to something like security, you have to take the money from somewhere,'' he said.

''There's no easy cut,'' he said of the water projects. ''Every one of these projects is needed, Halabja as well as the others.''

According to embassy figures, as of March 30 there were 249 water and sewage projects -- 185 in progress and 64 completed -- financed by the Congressionally approved money across Iraq. A total of 92 projects have been canceled because of the shift of money to security, the embassy said.

With his usual fine-grained recall, Mr. Nuradeen said his father, a guard at a local school, had once mentioned to him that in 1959 the central government in Baghdad had sent a team of engineers to Halabja to look for a water source.

Although the engineers concluded that a water project was feasible and the visit was reported in the papers, political upheaval in Iraq prevented anything from getting done. But gradually, through two stints of exile in Iran that were wrapped around a stellar academic career, Mr. Nuradeen became captivated with the idea of bringing water to Halabja himself.

The day after he learned that the American project had been canceled, Mr. Nuradeen drove up the rutted mountain road to the cave with the spring. The sections of salvaged pipe he had used to build a jury-rigged water supply line, 10 inches in diameter, meandered to one side. In several places, hissing sprays of water showed were rocks had fallen and punched holes in the pipes.

A roaring waterfall tumbled hundreds of feet down craggy rock walls from the cave itself, but Mr. Nuradeen found a side entrance, took off his shoes and socks and waded through the icy water into the darkness. Deep in the cave, he sat down on an outcropping so close to a cleft where the water burst forth in a deafening stream that it looked as if he might be swept away.

He sat there calmly looking at the water, and began singing to himself.

Photos: Fareed Allah Karam, top, checked a tank for the Halabja water department near where water surfaces from a bat cave. Above, the fountain is dry at Halabja's memorial to the victims of a chemical attack in 1988.; Nuradeen Ghreeb, a civil engineer, dreamed of bringing clean drinking water to his hometown, Halabja, but the United States canceled its planned water project there this week. (Photographs by Christoph Bangert/Polaris, for The New York Times)(pg. A6)

Map of Iraq highlighting Halabja: No more than half of the population of Halabja has running water. (pg. A6)